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Health Benefits Looking for a Science

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Health Without Bodies

Part of the book series: Health, Technology and Society ((HTE))

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Abstract

Is ‘functional food science’ a science? I propose the term stratagem to characterize the specificity of an approach developed by a community of nutritionists under the aegis of ILSI Europe in the late 1990s, who were anticipating legal developments with respect to health claims on the European market. A stratagem is a way of guiding and tricking one’s opponent in warfare. The particularity of the functional food stratagem is that it guides the beholder towards a new concept of health that steers away from medicine and disease. But if food ingredients are not allowed to cure, treat, or prevent disease symptoms in patients, how does one demonstrate that they improve the ‘health’ of people that are healthy? It becomes clear that for functional food nutritionists an ideal demonstration for food’s health benefits would be one without the interference of bodies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The full name of the project: European Concerted Action on Functional Food Science in Europe. FUFOSE is the abbreviation used in publications of the Commission and of the project members.

  2. 2.

    Consensus Document, preface.

  3. 3.

    See his book Scrinis (2013). For his characterization of nutritionism as an ideology: see Scrinis (2008). Michael Pollan (2008) has introduced the term ‘nutritionism’ to a wider audience in his best-selling book In Defense of Food. An Eater’s Manifesto.

  4. 4.

    For example, Foucault (2003) discusses the nineteenth-century origins of the medical ‘gaze’ in relation to a new geography and ontology of diseases in his famous The Birth of the Clinic. He also discusses the birth of ‘social medicine’ in a conference lecture, published in Dits et Ecrits II, see Foucault (2001).

  5. 5.

    For Daston (1995), ‘moral’ refers to both the psychological and the normative. And ‘economy’ means, in this context, a ‘balanced system of emotional forces, with equilibrium points and constraints’ in which ‘(n)ot al conceivable combinations of affects and values are possible’ (p. 4). A moral economy is rooted in activities or practices and derives its stability from it. As such, it is also a collective phenomenon. I return to this concept and relate it to debates on scientific evidence for health claims in Chap. 7. I will argue that the ‘moral’ is performed and situated not only within the realm of the psyche.

  6. 6.

    This is mentioned in the form of a disclaimer underneath the article.

  7. 7.

    The genus-differentia definition goes back to Aristotle, and a discussion of it can be found in: Granger, E.H. (1984). Granger argues that Aristotle defines the relation between genus and differentia in three different manners, and that this represents three stages in Aristotle’s thought. My use of the two terms is more general and serves only as a first clarification of the term ‘functional food’.

  8. 8.

    I refer again to cholesterol as one of many risk factors. Causality is mentioned three times in the entire Document, without it being the main issue in the section where it occurs.

  9. 9.

    Interview at the European Commission, DG SANTE, Brussels, 23/04/13.

  10. 10.

    I will return in more detail to the concept of ‘constitutive outside’, taken from Barry (2013) and originally from Butler (1993) in Chap. 5.

  11. 11.

    Personal interview at ILSI’s Annual Symposium. Brussels, March 24, 2011.

  12. 12.

    Interviews at the Belgian Federal Ministry of Health, Brussels, 12/03/2012, and at the Commission’s DG SANTE, Brussels, 23/04/13.

  13. 13.

    See, for example, Young (2005: 105) and the work of lobbyists Guéguen (2007) and Guéguen and Rosberg (2004).

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  1. FNRS & Spiral Research Centre, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium

    Kim Hendrickx

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Hendrickx, K. (2023). Health Benefits Looking for a Science. In: Health Without Bodies. Health, Technology and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4950-2_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4950-2_3

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